[webkit-dev] Adding ENABLE_NAVIGATOR_BUILDTYPE to WebCore

[Annie Sullivan]

On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 3:43 PM, Dean Jackson <dino at apple.com> wrote:
>
> On 07/06/2012, at 12:05 PM, Annie Sullivan <sullivan at chromium.org> wrote:
>
>> In many browsers in the past, it's been
>> pretty easy to determine from "a" and "b" characters in the user agent
>> of many browsers which builds are "alpha" and "beta", and I haven't
>> heard of bugs caused specifically by checking for build type there.
>
> So why not just do that then?

While it's nice that web developers don't seem to be using the build
type info in the user agent string in their code, user agent parsing
code is still very brittle. Some browsers, like Firefox, have had
buildtype characters in the user agent string for many years, so
parsing code can handle things like "Firefox/14.0a2". But Chrome
hasn't ever changed its version format, so we're worried about
breaking user agent parsers.